THE JOURNAL OF APPLIED BEHAVIORAL SCIENCEJune 2000O’Connor / PLOTTING TH ORGANIZATION Plotting the Organization The Embedded Narrative as a Construct for Studying Change

This article uses the literary form of the embedded narrative to link a particular text to the larger texts in which it is embedded, or the surrounding story situation. The article thus addresses a continuing problem in organizational discourse, which is the need to interpret discourse in relation to its context. It also shows how this construct sheds light on the complexity and dynamics of organizational change. The data are from a year-long ethnographic study of a high-technology research organization in Silicon Valley. Following social construction theory (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Weick, 1979) and greater sensitivity to the role of language in this construction (e.g., J. S. Nelson